College of Arts and Sciences

Department of English

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance

Robert Milder

"'The Ugly Socrates': Melville, Hawthorne, and Homoeroticism"

The question of Melville's homoeroticism in his relationship to Hawthorne is
deeply problematic--first, because of the chasm of culture, idiom, and ideology
separating Melville's time from our own and lending a character of alienness
and inscrutability to mid-nineteenth-century psychoerotic experience; and
second, because Melville himself seems to have been genuinely uncertain about
the nature and source of his feelings, both at the time and in retrospect.The
model of Greek love found in Plato's Symposium only complicated matters
so far as it could alternatively be used to sublimate, mask, license, or evade
homoerotic feelings, or in some combination do all of these things at once.

The first and third sections of my essay explore the Melville-Hawthorne
relationship from Melville's side, chiefly through Melville's letters to
Hawthorne but also with reference to Clarel and "After the Pleasure
Party." The long middle section is a psychobiographical reading of
Pierre as (in F. O. Matthiessen's words) the site where we might expect
to "find the most evident traces of the interaction of Hawthorne and
Melville." The essay engages the homoerotic readings of Melville advanced
by Newton Arvin and James Creech, but it takes issue with their separation of
the intellectual and sexual themes of Pierre into a version of Freudian
"manifest content" and "latent content." I am concerned
rather with how Melville came to understand the profound but elusive
intermingling of his intellectual life and his sexual/psychological
life, particularly with how the departure of Hawthorne from the Berkshires in
the fall of 1851 precipitated in Melville a psychic crisis that linked itself
to feelings of abandonment consequent upon his father's death years earlier and
that led him to reevaluate his emotional investment in Hawthorne and, indeed,
the integrity of his life's work. The section makes extended use of Freud's
"Mourning and Melancholia," John Bowlby's studies of parental loss,
and Heinz Kohut's theory of narcissistic personality disorders; its chief
allegiance, however, is to primary materials read closely and speculatively
within an exploratory consideration of a subject (Melville's
"homoeroticism") that can never be more than conjecturally resolved.